Jerome Brudos was a serial killer and a necrophiliac also known as “The Lust Killer” and “Shoe Fetish Slayer.”

The Early Life of Jerome Henry Brudos

Jerome Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota. His mother had wanted a girl, and often ignored and belittled him, by making him wear dresses, as a youngster. He had a fetish for women’s shoes from the age of five. He spent his teen years in and out of psychotherapy and state hospitals. Jerome began to stalk local women as a teenager, knocking them down and choking them unconscious, and then fleeing with their shoes.

At age 17, Jerome Brudos dug a hole and kept girls as sex slaves. This was soon discovered and he was taken to the psychiatric ward of Oregon State Hospital for nine months. There it was found his sexual fantasies revolved around his hatred and revenge against his mother and women in general.

Jerome Brudos suppressed his obsessions long enough to graduate from high school and become an electronics technician. In 1961, he married and settled in a Portland, Oregon suburb. It was at about this time, however, that he began complaining of migraine headaches and “blackouts,” relieving his symptoms with night-prowling raids to steal shoes and lace undergarments.

Ralphene Brudos

The Murders Committed By Jerome Brudos

Between 1968 and 1969, Jerome Brudos bludgeoned and strangled four young women. The only initial evidence was witness sightings of a large man dressed in women’s clothing.

After committing a murder, he would dress up in high heels and masturbate.

Police investigation and interviews of local coeds eventually led them to Jerome Brudos, who confessed to the murders in detail.

Married with two children, Jerome Brudos either lured or kidnapped the young women, sometimes with a uniform and badge. He took them to the garage of his Salem house and, usually within an hour, strangled them.

He photographed the women as they died and also after their deaths. Jerome then dressed their bodies in lingerie and had sex with them. He then cut off body parts as souvenirs. One foot he preserved and used to model his collection of high-heeled shoes. He cast a severed breast in resin for a paperweight.

When police searched his home, they found a collection of his photos, some showing victims hanging from a pulley. One of his victims choked to death after he used the contraption to lift her off the floor and left the room.

He was charged with three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The Incarceration of Jerome Brudos

While incarcerated, Jerome Brudos had piles of women’s shoe catalogues in his cell. He wrote to major companies asking for them, claiming they were his substitute for pornography. He lodged countless appeals, including one in which he alleged that a photograph taken of him with one of his victim’s corpses cannot prove his guilt, as it is not the body of a person he was convicted of killing.

While at the penitentiary, Jerome Brudos told the board that he has benefited from 17 years of psychological treatment, as well as schooling and work programs. “I’m more stable now than I ever was out on the streets,” he said.

The parole board told Jerome he would never be released. That he would die in prison.

Jerome Brudos Dies

Jerome Henry Brudos, the Salem electrician whose torture-murder of at least three young women in the late 1960’s gave law enforcement nationwide fresh insight into the dark forces that create a serial killer, died on March 28th 2006, in the Oregon State Penitentiary. He was 67 and the state’s longest-serving inmate.

The Oregon Department of Corrections released few details other than to say Jerome Brudos died at 5:10 a.m. in the prison infirmary.